The Silicon Chip Book

Description

The Silicon Chip Book by Peter Marsh

Published by Abacus (1981)

First Edition, Soft Cover, 202 pages, good condition, annotated.

Peter Marsh’s book captures a moment in time from 1981 about techno fears that we see echoed in today’s emergence of AI.

THE MICRO REVOLUTION

Will millions of people soon be unemployed as a result of the large-scale applications of the silicon chip?

Will nuclear war – and conventional warfare – be imminent now that chips control the complex circuitry of military warheads and communications?

Peter Marsh traces the development of computers from the earliest ‘dinosaurs’ the size of an office to the minute solid-state microprocessor, able to analyse and report in nanoseconds.

This small evolutionary jump has massive and frightening implications for our lives – for the shrinking computer now controls every aspect of society – from baking a cake to forging steel.

And Peter Marsh’s controversial analysis shows that the social schisms caused by governments’ failure to harness the fruits of this second Industrial Revolution are already here.

Excerpt from page 49:

‘The ‘brainbox’ shrinks – the integrated circuit. (Standard logic circuits for big computers, which are not all that densely-packed, sold at the rate of about 3 billion yearly in the computer industry of the late 1970s.)

The microprocessor, the chip you tend to hear most about, will probably start outselling the memory chips in the mid-1980s. In 1979, about 30 million microprocessor chips were sold. A ‘micro’ contains the basic guts of a computer inscribed as a series of n- and p-islands on a silicon substrate. Besides the processor with its logic gates, the device contains other parts too. It includes some memory cells to store the data that the chip calls upon often (a program of instructions, for instance) and control circuitry that governs how the signals flow from one part of the device to another.

The processor and memory parts of modern computers, along with control-circuitry, encompass three of the five components that Babbage said computers must have. The other two are the input and output units. In Babbage’s time these were mechanical devices by which the user put numbers into the machine (either data or instructions) and got other numbers out as results. Today, input and output units are still very important.’

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